which the main heroes presently clothe and colour with their eloquence and their passion.
98. As to the epilogue, or appearance of an interfering god—the deus ex machinâ— Euripides is by no means so regular. This device, which also appears in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, is absent from eight of plays—the Alcestis, Medea, Hecuba, Troades, Heracleidæ, Heracles, Phœnissæ, Bacchæ; that is to say, from extant plays of all dates. Where it occurs it is sometimes the mere authoritative declaration of the divine will, sometimes it becomes a dialogue or argument with the actors, though never approaching controversy, for its distinct purpose is to bring the action to a peaceful close, and calm the minds excited and disturbed with the calamities, and still more the apparent injustices, suffered by the actors.[1] The poet's intention may have been conservative; he may have wished to calm in the minds of the vulgar and thoughtless those sceptical questionings which constantly appear in his plays; but deeper students felt at once that this mechanical interference of the gods, this artificial and external righting of injustice and oppression in the course of human affairs, was no real solution of the evil, and that therefore the inner tendency of the plays was to unsettle men's minds, and produce religious, if not moral, scepticism. Thus the use of lay figures of gods—any character they do exhibit is spiteful and vindictive—seems an unfortunate concession of the poet to his age, and one which obscures the deep moral faith he feels in the ultimate supremacy of justice.
99. Far more effective are his lay figures of a very different kind—his children, who with their cry of
- ↑ It is a remarkable analogy between Greek tragedy and oratory, that great Greek speeches do not end with pathetic or exciting passages, but with some calm address to the reason, or tame recapitulation, as if the orator thought it inartistic to leave his audience in a state of high tension. No doubt the same æsthetic feeling gave rise to this curious parallelism in widely different branches of art.
